UFO ROUNDUP

Volume 3
Number 39
September 27, 1998

Editor: Joseph Trainor

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SPAIN DECLASSIFIES 83 MILITARY UFO FILES

Earlier this month Spain became the first nation
in Europe to open its classified UFO files to
researchers.

On September 7, 1998, the Fuerza Aerea d'Espana
(Spanish Air Force--J.T.) made available 83 case files
on UFO sightings in Spain, files which had previously
been classified Top Secret.

According to the newspaper Voz de Galicia, "The
truth is out there, in Madrid's General Air Force Library.
It was learned yesterday that the Spanish Air Force
has completed declassifying these official documents,
which began in 1990. The shelves of the Madrid library
hold the 83 'X-Files' previously classified as Top Secret.
Twenty percent of these cases lack any logical
explanation."

"One report, numbered as 891205, was opened in
December 1989," in which eyewitnesses described
"a lenticular UFO 'with a vast array of shining lights'"
which overflew the towns of Sada and Castro in
Spain's Galicia province, about 350 kilometers
(210 miles) northwest of Madrid.

"At 6:40 p.m." on December 5, 1989, "members of
the Benemrita (provincial police--J.T.) in Castro
notified the Lavacolla Central Tower, which notified the
army at the Aerial Vigilance Station at Noia (EVA 10).
Both radars, civilian and military, obtained the object,
which moved vertically."

At 8:40 p.m., three UFOs appeared on the EVA 10
radar set. Two vanished from the screen at 9:02 p.m.
But the third signal persisted until 8 a.m. the following
day, December 6, 1989.

The article also described a second case in Galicia
"from the five pages of File 660402."

On April 2, 1966, "a corporal, a watchman and two
sailors at Carreira watched a luminous object...It was
to the left of Mount Campelo. The phenomenon lasted
three-quarters of an hour. One of the witnesses took a
snapshot of the UFO, which shows only a white spot
against a black background." (See the newspaper
Voz de Galicia for September 8, 1998. Many thanks
to Scott Corrales, author of CHUPACABRAS AND
OTHER MYSTERIES for forwarding the article.)

UFOs HOVER OVER CITIES IN NORTHWESTERN FRANCE

The UFO flap in France continued last week
with more sightings along the Atlantic coast.

On Friday, September 18, 1998, at 10:40 p.m.,
a witness in the department of Eure, west of Paris,
contacted the French UFO group Banque OVNI and
reported seeing "a stationary light in the sky in the
direction (west) of Le Havre."

At 11:40 p.m., witnesses in Le Havre reported
spotting "a discoid object with three bright white
lights...one millimeter at arm's length. The sky was
clear and cloudless. The luminous object flew towards
the south-southeast, to the end of its path, over
Honfleur."

Le Havre is a harbor city at the mouth of the
river Seine, in the department Seine-Maritime, located
200 kilometers (120 miles) west of Paris. Honfleur is
on the south side of the river, about 12 kilometers
(9 miles) southeast of Le Havre.

The witnesses kept the luminous object in view
for 50 minutes and said it "always remained in the
same place in the sky. The object seemed to be too
slow to be a star. The planets along the plane of
the eclyptic were lower on the horizon."

Franck Marie of Banque OVNI is investigating
this case and has contacted Orly Airport and the
Centre Operationenel Inter-Armees, COIA (the
French Pentagon--J.T.) to see if the objects showed
on radar. (Merci beaucoup au Franck Marie et
Michel Granger pour ces nouvelles.)

FRENCH UFOLOGISTS SPAR OVER VOREPPE CASE

Service d'Expertise des Phenomenes de
Rentrees Atmospheriques (SERPA), the French
government's UFO study group, reversed its
position on the spherical metallic UFO seen and
videotaped in Voreppe on September 6, 1998.
But not all ufologists are in agreement.

The UFO was seen at 8 p.m. in Voreppe, a
town of the department of Isere, near Grenoble in
the French Alps. The witnesses, a family of four,
watched it hover over their garden and shot a
videotape of its departure.

On September 13, 1998, SEPRA, the Centre
National d'Etudes Spaciales (CNES) and the
Gendarmerie (French police--J.T.) announced the
results of the "joint investigation that raised doubts
about the object observed," and said "the spherical
object, probably metallic and incandescent" was
actually "a balloon filled with helium."

A CNES spokesman said, "The information has
been confided to us, convincingly, by Jean-Jacques
Velasco, head of SEPRA" that "what happened is
a family of Voreppe informed the police that their
son had dropped a balloon that was fairly large
(one meter in diameter) in the shape of a ladybug.
There was very little wind, and it drifted, finally
losing altitude, downward into the garden. Night
was falling, and the witnesses were mistaken about
its size. When they shot the video, the object was
already some distance away and hard to identify."

La coccinelle (French for ladybug--J.T.), the
CNES spokesman added, had a distinctive shape,
and on the tape, "a woman's voice could be heard,
saying, 'It looks like a ladybug.'" Also, "a string
could be seen on the video, floating under the
balloon."

Banque OVNI director Franck Marie disputed
the findings however, asking, "How could an
incandescent sphere of 5 or 6 meters be mistaken
for a balloon one meter wide with the bright sun
shining?"

He added that, "despite the 'very feeble wind,'
the object remained in place for at least two
minutes, during the film, at minimum." (See the
newspaper L'Union for September 13, 1998,
"L'OVNI de Voreppe etait un ballon gonfle a
l'helium." Merci beaucoup au Franck Marie et
Errol Bruce-Knapp pour ces nouvelles.)

(Editor's Comment: I know I shouldn't take sides
in a UFO dispute, but there are two questions
that I just have to ask. (A) What happened to
the scorched and charred tree branches collected
at the scene that evening by the Gendarmerie?
(B) If there was a "very feeble wind," then how
was the "balloon" able to depart the scene at
an estimated speed of 48 kilometers per hour?)

TRIANGULAR UFO SEEN IN NORTHERN ITALY

On Saturday, September 5, 1998, at 8 a.m.,
two ufologists in Como, a city just south of Italy's
border with Switzerland, spotted "with binoculars,
a brilliant light, like a flare from the sun. Because
of the brightness of the object, it was not possible
to observe it for very long."

At 11:30 p.m. that night, witnesses in Cusago
and Settimo Milanese, near Milano (Milan) about
60 kilometers (36 miles) southeast of Como, "saw
a luminous triangular object...the strange light was
flying at a high altitude above the horizon and made
many turns. Observed with a pair of professional
it revealed the shape and the lights arranged in
a triangular order, one attached to each corner."

At 11:30 p.m., "a similar arrangement of white
lights" was seen in the town of Cesano Boscone."
(Grazie a Alfredo Lissoni, Giuliano Bertelli e Marco
Guarisco di Centro Ufologico Nazionale, CUN, per
questo rapporto.)

FIVE UFOs SIGHTED IN YPENBURG, NETHERLANDS

On Saturday, September 19, 1998, at 2 p.m.,
eyewitnesses spotted a daylight disc over Ypenburg,
a small town near Delft in the Netherlands, about
60 kilometers (36 miles) southwest of Amsterdam.

Between 2 and 3 p.m., the witnesses sighted
"five lights," of which "some were triangular and the
others disk-shaped. They were about two to six
meters wide. They produced a faint blue and red
light. They were extremely fast and able to stop
instantly, then 'float' about...They disappeared at
high speed, straight up, in a formation." (USENET
Report)

(Editor's Note: Take this one with a grain of salt.
The writer did not respond to my three requests
for an email interview.)

AMBER OVOID UFO SEEN IN PORTSMOUTH, RHODE ISLAND

On Tuesday, September 22, 1998, at 4:18 p.m.,
Roscoe Sweeney (a pseudonym), a 22-year-old sailor
in the U.S. Navy, "was driving north on Burma Road"
in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (population 13,840)
"one mile from the Melville shipyard" when he spied
a UFO.

"It started above the tree line, about 10 degrees
above the horizon, and disappeared into the clouds...
Ended up slightly 30 degrees up. The departure angle
was close to 45 degrees. It departed into the west
and up."

"I'm a reliable judge of speed. This thing was
smoking and accelerating! Speed 400 to 500 knots,
with a behind-the-trees dash at Mach 1 (600 knots),
easy."

"It was the brilliance that brought my eye to it.
If I had done a slow blink, I would have missed it
completely. This was truly an amazing sight."

He described the UFO as "oval, like if you put
your thumb and index finger together to make the
OK sign. No blinking lights. Glowed like looking
at a picture of the filtered sun...amber/gold."

Portsmouth is on Aquidneck Island in Rhode
Island's Narragansett Bay, about 25 miles
(40 kilometers) southeast of Providence, the
state capital. (Email Interview)

UFOs FLY OVER FRESNO AND LOS ANGELES

UFOs were spotted twice in southern
California last week.

On Tuesday, September 22, 1998, at 9:40 p.m.,
Vikki and Joseph R. were at their home near the
Shields Avenue bypass in Fresno, California
(population 354,202) when they spotted a UFO.

Vikki reported, "My husband and I witnessed a
triangular-shaped object with lights set at regular
intervals. The object appeared to be a pyramid
shape. It had no sound. Altitude at my estimation
was 2,000 feet and it was last seen heading east
towards Nevada."

"From our vantage point, the craft looked
triangular in shape, almost a delta form, and had
five lights, three on one side, two on the other.
We had it in view about a minute, all total."

She added that the object "was about the
size of a football at arm's length. No noise
whatsoever...extremely quiet." (Email Interview)

Fresno is on Highway 99 about 215 miles
(344 kilometers) north of Los Angeles.

Two days earlier, on Sunday, September 20,
1998, "just before sunset," at 6:40 p.m., professional
photographer Victor M. "spotted a stationary object
above the Palos Verdes (hills) on the San Pedro
peninsula, on the east side of the hill. I was facing
west and spotted an object or objects just below
the clouds. I ran in my house to get the binoculars
and an SLR 35mm camera."

"Through the binoculars, I noticed a greyish
and sometimes shiny C-shaped object. The C was
with the open side up. The object appeared to have
split into two or three objects of the same shape.
Suddenly, the object turned into a V-shaped object
with the point of the V turned upward, inverted."

"Setting the binoculars down, I utilized the camera
which had a 200mm lens attached, ASA 50 film,
f5.6 at about 1/200 shutter speed, hand-held without
tripod, and I took about three to six shots."

He added that the UFOs "did not move at all," and
"I watched them for about 20 minutes" before they
departed. (Email Interview)

San Pedro is on Pacific Avenue about 16 miles
(25 kilometers) south of the Los Angeles Convention
Center.

MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS SEEN IN FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO

On Monday, September 14, 1998, Michael O.
"walked out of my house at 10:30 p.m. to go to my
next-door neighbor's" in Farmington, New Mexico
(population 33,937). "As I looked up into the night
sky, I noticed two flashing white strobe lights. They
were at approximately 75 degrees above the horizon."

He estimated that, at arm's length, the lights
were "the distance between my thumb tip and the
little finger tip," if the fingers were splayed apart.

"What was unusual was that they were absolutely
synchronous, as if they were attached to the same
aircraft, and yet they were too far apart to be. Unless,
of course, they were attached to an extremely large
aircraft."

"As I watched, the strobe on the right began moving
closer to the one on my left, while the one on the left
maintained its course. As the right one nearly merged
with the one on the left, it suddenly moved beneath it,
then moved up on the opposite side and continued
moving to the left until it was the same distance to the
left that it had been on the right. It then remained in
that position until both were out of sight."

Farmington is on New Mexico Highway 64
approximately 208 miles (333 kilometers) northwest
of Santa Fe. (Many thanks to Errol Bruce-Knapp
for forwarding this news story.)

SPHERICAL UFO SIGHTED IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY

On Wednesday, September 9, 1998, Bob Riker
(pseudonym) who "works in Florence (Kentucky) as
a computer technician and administrator," at 4 p.m.
"stepped outside for a cigarette. The sky was spotted
with clouds, and the sun was shining between them,
enough to provide adequate lighting."

Just then, Bob spotted a small spherical object
moving from the north to the south-southwest. "It
traversed the entire horizon from the north to the
southwest in less than ten seconds, going under
the low dark clouds before disappearing in a distant
cloud bank (and under an approaching plane.)

He added that "there was no sound from the object,
which seemed to glitter slightly from the background
sun, which was in the west. The object appeared to
briefly sparkle, as if it were reflecting a glow from
the sun. It was not necessarily glowing, more like a
reflective sparkle."

Florence, Kentucky (population 18,624) is about
21 miles (33 kilometers) south of Cincinnati, Ohio.
(Many thanks to Kenneth Young, public relations
director of Tri-States Advocates for Scientific
Knowledge, T.A.S.K., for this news story.)

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR TIGHTENS ITS ORBIT

On Wednesday morning, September 23, 1998,
NASA flight controllers sent a transmission to the
Mars Global Surveyor, ordering the spacecraft to
fire its rocket engine in an aerobraking maneuver.

"The 14.8-second engine burn Wednesday
morning was successful in using aerobraking to slow
the spacecraft's speed. Engineers are trying to reduce
the spacecraft's large elliptical orbit into a tight circle."

The aerobraking maneuver was originally scheduled
for March 1998. However, shortly after the spacecraft
arrived in orbit around Mars in September 1997, NASA
discovered that a solar panel was bent out of shape.
Controllers feared that an aerobraking maneuver might
snap off the panel completely.

The rocket burn changed Mars Global Surveyor's
point of closest approach from an altitude of 107 miles
(171 kilometers) to 79 miles (122 kilometers), and,
as a result, "each orbit should be less than two hours."
(Many thanks to Steve Wilson Sr. for forwarding the
NASA news release.)

(Editor's Comment: Lest we forget, the lander
Pathfinder and its little robot Sojourner are still
marooned on Mars, 213 million miles from home.)

from the UFO Files...

1824: STRANGE PHENOMENON AT ORENBURG

In late September 1824, people in Orenburg, Russia
were puzzled when they heard something clattering on
the onion-shaped roof of the Orthodox church. They
soon discovered "little symmetrical pieces of metal"
falling from the clear blue sky.

Months later, on January 25, 1825, the same
phenomenon occurred again.

Samples of the material were gathered and sent
to St. Petersburg (then capital of Russia--J.T.)

In Oeuvres vol. 11, page 644, a scientist, M. Arago,
noted that a chemical analysis of the objects had
showed them to be "70 percent red oxide of iron,
and sulphur, and loss (of mass) by ignition
(combustion) 5 percent." Amazingly the pieces
of metal showed signs of having been manufactured.

The Orenburg "sky fall" attracted the attention of
Prince Pavel Vasilyevich Dolgorukii, the "librarian"
of the mystic Brothers of the Inner Order. This was
an offshoot of the Lodge Harmonia, founded by
Nikolai Novikov in St. Petersburg in 1780.

When Empress Catherine II suppressed the
Masonic lodges of Russia in 1792 and jailed Novikov,
Dolgorukii and two brothers, Yuri and Nikita
Troubezkoi, formed the Brothers of the Inner Order.
They then set about collecting hundreds of books
on alchemy, mysticism and the paranormal,
including works by the most notorious occultists
of the period. The collection had a first edition
Originalschriften des Illuminatenordensekte by
Adam Weishaupt and pamphlets by Jean-Baptiste
Willermoz and the ayatollah Shaikh Ahmed Ahsai.

After Dolgorukii's death in 1838, the collection--
and perhaps a handful of those mysterious Orenburg
artifacts--passed into the possession of his daughter,
Mme. Nadyezhda de Fadeyev.

In 1846, about the time of the war between the
USA and Mexico, Mme. de Fadeyev's 15-year-old
niece, Elena Petrovna von Hahn, spent the summer
reading all the mystical books in her deceased
grandfather's library.

Thirty years later, as the author/occultist
Madame Blavatsky, Elena hinted at the strange
doings in Orenburg in her book, THE SECRET
DOCTRINE, "...more than one Russian mystic
travelled to Tibet via the Ural Mountains in search
of knowledge and initiation in the unknown crypts
of central Asia. And more than one returned years
later with a rich store of such information as could
never have been given him anywhere in Europe."

This trail, similar to the "Underground Railroad"
for escaped black slaves in the early Nineteenth
Century USA, led from St. Petersburg and Moscow
straight through--you guessed it--Orenburg.

Sad to say, the Dolgorukii collection vanished
sometime in the 1890s, after Mme. de Fadeyev's
death.

Orenburg is located just south of the Ural
Mountains 600 kilometers (360 miles) east of
Moscow. (See THE COMPLETE BOOKS OF
CHARLES FORT, Dover Publications Inc.,
New York, NY, 1974, page 178. See also
THE MASTERS REVEALED by K. Paul Johnson,
State University Press, Albany, NY, 1994,
pages 19 to 22.)

(Editor's Note: Declassified files of the Third
Section secret police of the Tsarist Ministry of
the Interior revealed last year that a UFO,
described as "an intense burst of white light,"
was seen over Orenburg by dozens of people,
including government officials, in January 1846,
about six months before young Elena developed
an interest in her grandfather's occult library.)

FUN UFO WEBSITES:

Don't miss our parent site, UFOINFO, for the
lastest in UFO photos, news and features. Check
it out at http://ufoinfo.com.

September 29 is the birthday of movie actor
Gene Autry, the first...and mercifully the only...
singing cowboy ever to visit Pellucidar. Born
Orvon Gene Autry on a ranch near Tioga, Texas
on September 29, 1907, he was working at a
railroad telegraph office in Oklahoma when
comedian Will Rogers walked in and heard him
singing. Rogers encouraged Autry to pursue a
career in show business. In 1928, Autry began
singing on a local radio station. He made his
film debut in a Ken Maynard Western, and in
1935, starred in his own movie, a 13-chapter
serial entitled The Phantom Empire.

The Phantom Empire is a weird blend of
Western and science fiction and of interest to
ufologists because it is possibly the first movie
to deal with the theme of cattle mutilation.

We'll be back next week with more saucer
news from around the planet, brought to you by
"the paper that goes home--UFO Roundup."
See you then.

UFO ROUNDUP: Copyright 1998 by Masinaigan
Productions, all rights reserved. Readers may post
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